So I’ve gone ahead and installed the first beta of wordpress 3.1 – right here on my live site!

I know, craziness and all that. I have taken some precautions… I have an automated routine backing up my database regularily, and (touch wood) if anything goes nuts I will be able to fix it.

So upon upgrading, the first thing I saw when running with 3.1 was this stupid ‘admin bar’ across the top of my site. And my first reaction was “WTF is that on my site?!” My second reaction being to find out how to remove the stupid thing.

Honestly, that should be a setting (defaulted to “off”), or a plugin. To include that in the core as an automatic, default on, not-obviously-removable ‘feature’ is just plain wrong. I don’t care if nobody else could see it except logged-in administrators. Slapping shit onto my site without my permission, let alone knowledge — and making it something you can’t even turn off without googling for the secret code — is a big red flag in my books.

Admin-bar ranting aside, it’s too early yet to say much either way. No obvious crashing-and-burning, so the next task for me will be to expand my theme to start taking advantage of the new Post Format feature. I’ll have a shot at that over the weekend; I already have some ideas of what to do with it.